8
To begin with, Andrew Hook comes from Norwich in Norfolk, England, on the River Wensum. Norwich was designated, in 2012, as being a UNESCO City of Literature. Which starts the entire tome off with high expectations. During World War II, the Luftwaffe bombed Norwich. The heaviest raids being Baedeker Raids on the nights of the twenty seventh to thirtieth of April 1942. The Baedeker Raids were based on the famous tourist guide series by Baedeker. The Church of St John Maddermarket's graveyard includes the Crabtree headstone, decorated with pre-Christian symbols of the Ouroboros and with Masonic Square and Compasses. Norfolk has a particularly quiet, backwater image. Which is exactly why Andrew Hook retired there to review and collate and expand upon the small leatherbound notebook embossed with an N.
In six score pages, Hook manages to tell us nothing of Senada. If this were a Biography of, say, Tony Sheridan - backing singer to Conway Twitty and Gene Vincent - (whose refusal to allow Sheridan to ride to the next venue in 1960 saved Sheridan's life) - there would be intricate detail of the relationship between Sheridan, the Beatles in Hamburg and the inevitability of Hook writing about Senada. That would be an orthodox Biography. What Hook has done with "O For Obscurity, Or, The Story of N" is something remarkably different and, for anybody interested in the Residents, something remarkably more useful.
Hook has embraced the Theory of Obscurity. Having the coded diaries of Senada he could have simply decrypted them, translated them and rendered them into a dull and literal narrative. Instead, Hook simply takes the fundamental principles of Obscurity - as lived out by N - and utilises them to inform a Biography with so little personal detail that it is almost as if N is absent. In terms of communicating what Senada understood and meant by Obscurity there is no greater guide than O for Obscurity.
There is a scene, describing a visit to the 1936 Chess Olympiad by N. (pp 29-31) which, in compressed prose, Hook flitters over the Estonian Paul Keres and Slovenian Vasja Pirc giving them equivalence of significance with the Architecture of the Nympheburg Palace, to deliver one of the most astoundingly modern images:
"The entire hall, filled with teams from twenty-one different countries was - in fact - participating in the largest stop-motion animation event that Munich had ever witnessed". (p. 31).
These are the insights that are needed into the life of N., not the colour of his socks or the pallour of his face but the inconsequential puns of his life. Such as when entering America, placing an o above the letter of Sex to give måle. (p. 4) An obsolete German word still current with Baviarians in the Twentieth Century. It translates as mark or sign or spot. It was so faint that nobody noticed it. Which is what Hooks achieves: a primer, a manual, a pedagogic method for internalising Obscurity. Reading O For Obscurity, Or, The Story of N is a manual in the praxis of Obscurity.
Hook describes that there are large gaps in the Diaries while carefully pointing out that Senada had left large gaps on Pollex Christi and that the Book was written entirely from Memory while listening to the Residents' instantiation of "Pollex Christi" (p. 120) thus ensuring the Reader is intimately aware with the correct method for reading the book. Ideally it should be read in a single sitting to a small audience without any breaks. The Audience should wrap up warm and listen carefully because, as with much of the Theory of Obscurity, their memory of what was said is more reliable than any tome.
Hook has managed to capture the essence of what it is to be obscure in a practical sense. From the gradual dissolution of N from Germany as the History of Tyranny unfolds to the gentle dissolution of N into Alaskan society as the History of Culture collapses. There are well sketched parallels between various parts of the life of N which make the Reader suppose that Hook has, somehow, concocted a story around N. A kind of shield or protection from the World. A barrier that preserves the practice of Obscurity which, if you read the Book uncritically, allows you to suppose a narration of a brief and marginally interesting life. If you willingly accept that Hook has embraced the Theory of Obscurity then you realise it is not a Biography of N but a Handbook.
In Christian Saint's Hagiographies there is a practice of giving a vita brevis or brief life. This is not some pared down and bullet pointed curriculum vitae or resume for an employer. It is a living thread through a persons life which highlights the central meaning of what it was to be that saint. Which is the approach Hook seems to succeed with: pulling a thread through a brief period of time - albeit almost a century long. A brief life.
Hook manages to touch briefly, and clearly, on the small matter of the definition of "Obscurity". "There is no easy definition of Obscurity" (p. x - I forget which), he claims; and then talks of Obscurity as darkness and as obfuscation. Which, coming after the exposition of the infra-fine detail of the life of N. acts as the catalyst for two things: reading the book again and discovering what obscurity really is.
The Book has a number of remarkably good puns and sleight of hand - or pen - to produce a readable work that would stand on its own merits absent N. - which is probably the best thing about it. Hook has managed to write an obscure novel while writing a decent biography. His almost imperceptable use of The Theory Phonetic Organisation applies to Biography by putting the words first and building up the facts from there rather than developing the facts and working down to the biography that makes them up. Facts being made up is the hallmark of good literature, after all.
Scattered through with allusion to numbers stations and the mysterious code, the Book is well illustrated with images that seem to derive from the Cryptic Corporation Archive; and, it is a nicely produced volume in easy to read font and just the right size for holding and reading while falling asleep. Not as exciting as a Sheridan Biography but actually, far more subtle than most. Few Biographies can boast being a handbook for becoming culturally invisible.
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